Kick-off Your Link-Building Campaign

Before kicking off any marketing campaign, regardless of what channel you are focused on, always keep your objective in mind.

In this case, your objective is to build links with websites outside your own to improve the authority of your site in the eyes of search engines and as a result, help your content or products rank competitively in the search engine results page for a given keyword.

With your objective in mind, follow these steps.

Start with the list of targeted keywords you created in the previous lesson. You want to establish authority for these keywords.

When you go out to ask other people to add a backlink to you, you will need to have something for them to point to, and ideally, that something is valuable and contains the keywords on your list.

That means you need to identify the content for which you would like to build a link. This content can take a variety of formats such as:

White Papers
Product Pages
How to Guides
Videos
Images
News Articles

Choose the piece of content or information for which you would like to get a link from an external webpage.

Then, identify target groups, websites, or blog sites that would find this piece of content relevant, informative and valuable.

To determine who might be interested in featuring your content or product, keep a few key factors in mind during your research:

Is the site relevant to your content or product?
Does the site fit your target audience?
Does that site have a large audience and lots of traffic?

Next, it’s up to you to sell your idea. When we say “sell your idea”, we don’t mean that money changes hands. Keep in mind that paying for links won’t help you in your search rankings. There are advertising platforms that sell links, where you can pay to relate a site’s content to your website, but those links are treated differently by search engines and they won’t help you in your SEO efforts. In the end, buying links is risky, and the short term gains are not worth the risk to your company or webpage.

Instead, selling your idea is about the grassroots process, where you contact a website owner or blogger to feature your content, and try to convince them that you have something that is worth sharing and linking to.

Let’s say that you are responsible for link building for Betabrand. Here’s an example outreach email you might send.

Note: this is not an actual email sent from Betabrand.

To: gals@thevacationgals.com

From: you@betabrand.com

Subject: Betabrand Travel Pants Review? [No Bait and Switch - Directly Mention Purpose]

Body:

Hi Kara, [Direct Email to a Person]

I’m excited to have come across your travel blog recently after one of my friends mentioned she was a long-time follower of yours. [Friendly Introduction, But Not Ingenuine]. I am a marketer over at Betabrand where we have been working on a Travel Yoga Pant that I believe would be a great fit for your readers, particularly those that are traveling long distances [Mention Why Product Is Fit For Specific Audience].

Over the years, women travelers have taken to traveling in style and in comfort by wearing yoga pants. While comfortable, when flying long distances, traditional yoga pants can become rather restrictive and in some instances, caused ankle swelling. [Mention Why Audience Will Care].

At Betabrand, with the help of our Think Tank collaborators and designer Tony Wloch, we have created the ultimate travel trousers that are both comfortable and versatile, regardless of how long a journey may be.

I’d love to send you a pair of our Travel Yoga Pants for your review and would welcome a post on your blog, or a mention on social, about your experience with the pants. [Don’t Ask for Positive Review].

I have provided a link to the product here. [Share Product Link]. Thank you for your consideration. We are looking forward to hearing from you. [Be Professional and Grateful].

Thank you,

Anke
Marketer, Betabrand
Contact Details [Your Details]

You’ll want to establish and then nurture relationships with these website owners or bloggers. Over time they can become an incredibly valuable network of people who will feature your content and link to your webpage.

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